As the world becomes more complex, our lives ire impacted by many factors which occur on many different scales of magnitude, from the international to the national and the local. From these different scales of information, each user will find certain information useful and other information meaningless. The status of these kinds of information will change over time. The focus of interest will be variable, but although the focus may shift, it is still important to see the factors surrounding and contributing to the focus of interest. Thus, seeing connections between information is often more useful than viewing isolated pieces of information. Context becomes important. A system of organizing data will be more effective if it can display all levels from the global to the local, while still providing the user with a sense of relationship between the different scales.
In modern computer based systems, the organization of data is primarily handled through the use of a graphical user interface. A typical graphical user interface may be a windows-based system for interfacing with a programmed computer by means of graphical display windows. Over the past few decades, a variety of graphical user interfaces have been developed to ease human interaction with computer systems. Many user interfaces utilize metaphors in the design of the interface as a way of maximizing human familiarity and conveying information between the user and the computer. Through the use of familiar metaphors, such as desk tops, notebooks and the like, the interface takes advantage of existing human mental structures by drawing upon the metaphor analogy to lead to an understanding of the requirements of the particular computer system.
In current generation systems, it is common for computer systems to incorporate so-called "object-oriented" display systems which utilize multiple "windows" on a display in which combinations of text and graphics are shown.
Using a desk top metaphor, the windows may take the form of a variety of objects, such as file folders, loose leaf binders, or simple rectangles, and the windows may overlap one another with the top window being the active one. Following the metaphor, the windows simulate sheets of paper which obscure each other when stacked in the same manner as physical sheets may do on a physical desk of limited size. Also true to the metaphor, it is possible to lose a sheet or folder which is out of sight in a stack in much the same way as a physical sheet may be misplaced on a disordered desk top. Thus the advantage of familiarity which the metaphor engenders is also accompanied by the disadvantages found in this same physical metaphor.
In a typical window-based Graphical User Interface ("GUI"), files and display objects are represented by visual symbols, commonly referred to as "icons". These icons are designed to provide a generic representation of the file contents, usually together with a title. Thus all word processing documents done with a common application will have a generic icon identifying them as a kind of document, accompanied by a title which is meant to be descriptive of its contents for easy recognition. Similarly, graphic files whose contents are pictorial are themselves usually represented by a generic icon which identifies them as a type of file, again, with a hopefully descriptive title for recognition purposes. Naturally, this title will never provide recognition of the file's contents as immediately as the picture contained in the file. Especially in applications where graphic files are manipulated by cropping, enhancing, etc., formulating descriptive titles for variations which will be recognizable later can be challenging. Some commercially available software programs such as HiJaak.TM. have been designed to correct this problem by producing "thumbnails" which replace generic icons. These can enhance recognition by converting the generic icons to icon-sized depictions of the graphic file contents but these are generally limited in size. Typically, there is no included mechanism for closer inspection which may be necessary to distinguish between files which have been modified but appear from a distance to be identical.
In the prior art, the organization of icons and the information they represent usually is accomplished without conveying a sense of the context in which that particular information exists. Files relating to a common subject may be grouped together in a directory, but this relationship is usually only observable by exiting the file and viewing its position with a file manager program such as Windows Explorer.TM.. A user can easily lose any sense of context when dealing with such a GUI. Additionally, when a document or file is selected, there is no easily visible dynamic re-ordering of related files by which a user may track his position in an information environment with multiple scales of information. As an example, a manager of a factory may wish to control the speed of a production line while following the price of raw materials on the world market. The prior art does not allow the reception and manipulation of information on such multiple scales, and provides no sense of the relationship between these levels of data.
Prior art inventions have tried various means to deal with the tendency of materials to be obscured or lost by overlapping windows in a graphic user interface which uses the desktop metaphor. U.S. Pat. No. 5,561,757 to Southgate discloses two separate window areas. One area may be designated as an overlap area where the windows are allowed to overlap and at least partially obscure each other. A second area allows windows to be displayed in a tiled format, where there is no overlap. This invention alleviates some of the tendency to lose files due to having them buried in a stack, but for large numbers of files, the tiled representations will be so small that locating a desired file may still be difficult. Additionally, this configuration of files gives no sense of how the files are related to each other.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,341,466 to Perlin shows a fractal computer interface with zooming capability. A variety of documents can be viewed as if spread out upon the metaphorical desktop as seen from a distance. By selecting an area and zooming in, the viewer appears to approach the area which contains the chosen document. Other surrounding documents appear to move off the edges of the screen as the field of view approaches the area of the selected document. This is analogous to viewing a desktop through a picture frame held at arm's length, and advancing toward the desktop as the field of view zooms in. Non-selected items at the periphery of the field of view are enlarged at the same rate as the chosen item of interest. There is no dynamic interaction and ordering of non-selected materials in response to the selection, thus the sense of relationship is easily lost. Moreover, in order to re-establish this sense of relationship, the field of view must be zoomed out again, at which point the documents may become too small to identify, or even disappear from view altogether.
SELF is a large information space which has been the object of a research effort by Sun Microsystems, and is concerned with a different metaphor for interacting with computers. On a computer, the SELF window is a large surface upon which the user navigates by looking at a thumbnail sketch of the overall space. The user can pan the field of view within the space, but objects do not resize or arrange themselves dynamically during user interaction.
Pad++ is a user interface in which the user can navigate by zooming. Users can zoom into an image and find more information behind that image. However, users can move past information without noticing and lose track of it, and this can lead to the same sort of disorientation that some people experience in Virtual Reality environments.
Thus, there is a need for a graphic user interface which interacts dynamically with the viewer to allow easy viewing of the item of interest, while still making visible the relationship of the non-selected items. Additionally, there is a need for a system for organizing data which can display all levels of information from the global to the local, while still providing the user with a sense of relationship between the different scales. Such an interface would maintain the context of the surrounding information or controls and make navigating, finding, and using such objects simple and easy.